The West Midlands has been identified as one of the worst-hit areas for council job losses in a study examining government spending cuts.

The GMB union said the number of people employed by councils in England and Wales had fallen by almost a quarter of a million, from 2,254,000 in the first quarter of 2010 to just over two million in the same period this year.

The biggest losses were in the South West, where local authority employment had fallen by 40,600, followed by the North West (34,300), East of England (30,300), West Midlands (25,000) and Yorkshire and the Humber (24,300), said the report.

The councils with the biggest cuts were Cornwall, Devon, Essex, Lancashire, Suffolk and Nottinghamshire, according to the research. Employment in the public sector as a whole had fallen from 6.3 million to 5.9 million over the same period, said the GMB.

General secretary Paul Kenny said: "What lies behind these statistics is the cold, hard fact that this Government has destroyed 236,900 local authority jobs in England and Wales since the general election in 2010.

"In the UK as a whole 424,000 jobs have been lost in the public sector in that period. These cuts have created unemployment, denied job opportunities to young people and cut services as the bankers continue to rip away with their bonuses and fiddles

"The Government’s role is to deliver an economy which grows employment and living standards. Perhaps someone should take a note around to Number 11 Downing Street to explain this to the Chancellor.

"The Government said it was making these cuts to bring down the deficit but all the economic data confirms that the economy is going nowhere and that there has been no reduction in the deficit."

In Birmingham alone, more than 1,200 council jobs have been shed since April last year, prompting chief executive Stephen Hughes to issue an apology to staff last November for not paying enough attention "to the hurt you are all feeling".